Everybody wins when NASA does something good, and the news that the program selected its highest percentage, ever, of female astronauts for its new class is no exception. The eight new astronaut candidates — four of whom are women — could join the 49 active astronauts already working at NASA.

The new possible spacepeople were chosen from a pool of over 6,000 applicants. Given that NASA retired all their space shuttles, the first missions for the new astronaut candidates could be aboard a commercial vessel launched in the U.S. Eventually, they could be part of a planned mission to an asteroid, and possibly Mars, NASA told the AP.

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